Jamin Barton is a soft-spoken musician with a quick laugh and a winning smile who tends bar under the nickname “Sudsy” at the 500 Club in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was closing up after a slow Tuesday last month when he saw the phone.

“We find about 20 a week,” he says with a shrug. “Most people come back for them in 15 minutes.”

Not this phone. It sat by the cash register unclaimed all the next day. “I don’t know anything about this stuff, but I know enough to know this phone was different.”

It was locked, and had no SIM card to activate it, so there was no way to identify or contact the owner directly. But it did have a “not for sale” sticker and a Google logo on the back.

Barton showed the device to a tech-savvy regular named Dave who immediately identified it as the upcoming Nexus 4, which Google is set to unveil at an event in New York on October 29. [Update: Apparently, the event’s been cancelled “due to Hurricane Sandy.”]

Dave agreed to make some calls to Google HQ. When Barton heard back from him the next day, Dave was shaken.

“Dave” — Barton says he does not know his full name — “sort of freaked out. ‘Google lost a phone,’ he told me. ‘You just got a guy fired…. The Google police are coming'”

After that, the texts and phone messages from Dave became a torrent.

“I probably shouldn’t have shown it to him. But I did. He didn’t work for Google, but Google had him pretty worked up. They told him he could be an accessory or something.”

Anybody who cares has already known for weeks pretty much exactly what Google plans to unveil. Google has confirmed none of it, of course. But who are we kidding? The Nexus 4, manufactured by LG, will have a 4.7-inch, 1280 x 768 display, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 CPU, and an 8-megapixel rear camera. The Nexus 4 is also rumored to ship running Google’s as-yet-unreleased Android 4.2 operating system, which is rumored to be dubbed “Key Lime Pie.”

The Nexus is particularly important to Google because it is the company’s flagship smartphone, the one model it works directly with manufacturers to design, and the one for which it brooks no monkeying around by the wireless carriers who usually sell them. If the rumors turn out to be true, this will be a major upgrade on every front to the last Nexus model, released about a year ago.

Google, and every other tech company, desperately wants to keep these sorts of details secret for competitive reasons until they’re ready to announce them. The internet has more or less made that impossible.

But, on the night of Sept. 20, Google wasn’t fighting the internet. It was up against a bartender, and Brian Katz, global investigations and intelligence manager at Google (according to his LinkedIn profile — “Google does not discuss the actions of its security team,” a representative says) was headed to the 500 Club.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, it is.

In 2010, an Apple engineer named Gray Powell left an iPhone prototype at the Gourmet Haus Stadt in Redwood City. A young man named Brian Hogan took it and sold it to a tech site for $5,000. The site, Gizmodo, published a bombshell story that eventually led to a police search of a reporter’s home and criminal charges against two men involved in the caper. Hogan and Sage Wallower pleaded no contest last October to misdemeanor theft of lost property, and were sentenced to one year probation and 40 hours of public service.

Apple allegedly lost another phone, also at a San Francisco Mission District Bar, Cava 22, according to a report on CNET last year.

By the time Katz was speeding north to the Mission District, Barton says, he had already agreed to hand the phone over to Google the next day, at noon, on the sole condition that the guy coming to get it could prove he actually worked for Google. “What was I supposed to do, look for the guy with Google shirt? How did I know this guy didn’t work for Apple?”

Katz, who oddly was using Dave as a go-between, had apparently erased the words “impossible” and “no” from his vocabulary. He insisted on meeting ASAP, that night, at the bar. Barton refused. Telling co-workers he felt “harassed,” he cut his shift early and wound up playing a gig at another bar nearby.

“Katz was like a disappointed mom when I told him Jamin wasn’t here,” says Barton’s colleague Don Hodge, a guy with well-inked arms and a general don’t-fuck-with-me demeanor, pulling on a Bud Light. “He was little but really pushy, like military…. He said he wanted to keep me out of trouble — like I was in any kind of trouble — keep the bar out of trouble. They could file criminal charges, he said.”

Instead of answering Katz’s questions, Hodge “sent him on a wild goose chase,” telling him Barton was around the corner at the local police station reporting the phone lost. Katz raced out to try to intercept him and avoid an avalanche of paperwork, but wound up cooling his heels instead in hopes Barton would eventually show.

It would be a long night.

On nearby 14th Street, undercover cops had just gunned down a gang suspect in the road after he produced an illegal TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol and appeared to point it at one of them. The neighborhood erupted in outrage, and dozens of people attacked and vandalized the Mission precinct station while Katz was still inside.

“It was the night of the riot,” says Ragi Dindial, a lawyer Barton knew through the music scene. “I met Katz there and they hustled us out the back door, past riot police in full riot gear and automatic weapons.”

Dindial went to get the phone from Barton and eventually handed it over to Katz at around 1 a.m., after confirming his identity with a call to Google’s 24-hour security line.

“Google ID cards are these squishy electronic tags that have nothing on them but a name,” he says. “We couldn’t tell a thing from that… In the end the only thing that really convinced me was his desperation…. He was desperate [to get that phone].”

According to Dindial, Katz offered Barton a free phone (it will likely have a retail value of about $300) if he agreed to keep quiet about the incident and not release photos or discuss the phone with the press until after Monday’s press conference. (Disclosure: Wired agreed to pay Barton a freelance fee for the photos published with this article.)

About two weeks later, on Oct. 8, different pictures of the Nexus 4 and a detailed report leaked onto a website in Belarus.

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